About a year ago, I took a look at how Africa accesses Facebook on mobile as part of a project for a course run by the ODMA (the Ogilvy Digital Marketing Academy). I sourced all of the data from Facebook’s ad planning tool and broke the data down into:

Total Facebook users by country

Total mobile Facebook users by country

Total mobile users accessing Facebook on Feature phones, on Android, on iOS, on BlackBerry and on Windows Phone.

Facebook recently announced that there are over 100 million people in Africa using Facebook, half of all Africans connected to the internet. And since it’s been a year since my original post, I decided it was time to relook how Africa accesses Facebook on mobile in 2014.
Last year, I mainly looked at the five countries with the largest number of Facebook users. This year, I looked at how many people were using each mobile platform to access Facebook across the continent. Here are the results:

40,817, 600 African access Facebook on Android devices

This accounts for roughly 45% of mobile Facebook users in Africa

The number of Africans using Android devices to access Facebook has increased 244% in the past year

35,533,600 Africans access Facebook on Feature Phones

This accounts for roughly 39% of mobile Facebook users in Africa

The number of Africans using Android devices to access Facebook has increased by 19%

6,209,240 Africans access Facebook on iOS devices

This accounts for roughly 7% of mobile Facebook users in Africa

The number of Africans using iOS devices to access Facebook has increased by 58%

5,778,880 Africans access Facebook on BlackBerry devices

This accounts for roughly 6% of mobile Facebook users in Africa

The number of Africans using Blackberry devices to access Facebook has increased by 3%

1,649,440 Africans access Facebook on Windows Phone devices

This accounts for roughly 2% of mobile Facebook users in Africa

The number of Africans using Windows Phone devices to access Facebook has increased by 146%

Some General Observations from the Data:

Compared to last year, more Africans are using Android devices (although this may include tablets) to access Facebook than Feature Phones. Bear in mind that this doesn’t mean that there are more Android devices than feature phones in Africa.

All the use of all mobile platforms to access Facebook grew over the past year

Android enjoyed triple digit growth in the majority of African countries in the study – this growth may increase in coming years as Google launches Android One in Africa

The number of Facebook users in Africa grew by 26% in the past year with 92% of users accessing the service on mobile devices

A Note on the Data:

All of the data used in this post was sourced directly from Facebook’s Advertising Tool. To the best of my knowledge, all of the above data is as accurate as possible at the time of originally publishing this post. If there is an error in the data, it may be my fault (please let me know if you find something wrong). If I was not at fault, then Facebook was drunk. You can find a full PDF of the data here. If you would like it in an editable spreadsheet, please let me know and I will gladly supply it.

I have tried my best to not be misleading with the data in this post. You are free to reuse any of the figures in this article but please do so in context – this is important to make both you and myself seem less stupid.

Thanks for the comment Sibusiso! In terms of exploiting the opportunity, I think marketers could look at doing more interesting things with mobile since more people than we think have smartphones. Personally, I’m amazed at the growth of Android and I don’t think app developers understand the scale of the platform. If you look at an app like Instagram, if it wants to get to a billion users, most of them will come from Android and not other competing mobile OSes.

With regards to Twitter, I think they are dealing with a lot of problems at the moment. It’s hard for new users to use and growth has stalled. It’s great for real time things but I actually think Instagram is going to out grow Twitter and become more important for brands. That’s just my opinion